The rope itself isn’t the issue. It really isn’t. Neither were the jeep or the chopper. The real issue is that all of these things cumulatively feed into a *fear* that Home will turn into a place which requires financial investment to enjoy.

Home is a free playground. I suspect it likely always will be free, because that way there’s no barrier to entry for the tens of millions of registered users. There’s no economic incentive to move the whole thing to a subscription service. Thus, the core Home experience for the more socially-minded, like you and I, will almost certainly never be truly impacted by various commercial ventures implemented by Sony. The PS Plus space in SCEE Home and the Sodium VIP lounge are two excellent examples of ghost towns that didn’t impact the community.

That said, I think it’s futile to expect Sony to not experiment with different means of revenue generation. Some of them will work and some won’t. All of us at HSM have spent the last year clamoring for social improvements to Home (with some really well-written articles to that end), and that work hasn’t gone unnoticed. But that’s not the only method to generate more revenue — and let’s face it, were we in charge of Home, like any business, that’s the first and foremost concern we have to look at.

(Before anyone jumps in and says that revenue trumps community satisfaction: that’s a false argument. The more satisfied the community, the greater the likelihood of them spending money and recommending it to their peers. The key is figuring out *how* to get everyone to spend money. Home has been the gaming industry’s equivalent of a free lunch for three years, and I’m amazed by a certain entitlement attitude that’s developed as a result.)

Thus, when various ideas are proposed or implemented — and particularly when Home officials blatantly solicit feedback on what the community would like to see in terms of premium programs — the point that I keep trying to get across to everyone is that simply planting one’s feet and saying no to all of it isn’t going to be very effective. Strategically, it makes far more sense to try to steer their ventures towards what we want to see, or what would at the very least be minimally intrusive.

I don’t ascribe any sort of maliciousness to what Sony’s doing (even if some of it has been rather boneheaded). They’ve got an aging application that had little to offer at launch, played catch-up for years, was written off by the press, and has a very fickle (and small) core population that bought into the concept of what Home *was* and is now trying to adapt to what Home has to evolve into if it is to survive.

That core population has half the equation. Stamping one’s feet and saying no to every new venture doesn’t give much insight as to what Sony *ought* to do instead. Home can’t continue to be such a free playground. The only way to cover the cost of the core updates required to introduce more dramatic social enhancements to Home is to find ways of generating additional revenue and attracting more developers to the platform. Commercializing Home, at least in contrast to what it was three years ago, is thus a necessary evil.

(The “SonyLand” charge that was coined over on the forum amuses me. Why does everyone seem to overlook the fact that all of the Hub elements are free? It cost a fortune to develop, and it took *years* to put together. I was fully expecting Cogs, Bootleggers and Poker to be freemium experiences, but they’re all completely free. This astonishes me. And has anyone bothered to say a simple “thank you” to Sony for reintroducing a proper poker application to Home *and* making it free? Oy.)

We can best serve our own interests by saying no to stupid ventures (such as the rope) *and* offering feedback on what to do instead. The latter half is critical, because it gives the developers a clear understanding of what people are willing to support. And the clearer the picture, the more accountability there is to bring it to life.

When I managed sales operations at a couple of (hotel brand withheld) resorts, what I used to look at were my CSS (Customer Satisfaction Survey) scores. Negative scores where someone puked about everything that they expected and didn’t get were fairly useless to me, and did little to alter my business plan. The scores that got my attention — and got the attention of my superiors back at corporate — where the ones which had detailed analysis of what was functionally wrong or could be improved upon, with suggestions of how best to do it. Even if those reports were very harsh, I at least had something to work with. And those reports made a huge difference.

Catch is, most people don’t have the patience or discipline to bring a solution as well as a problem. But that’s exactly what we need to do if we’re to improve Home. And the voices which will have the most impact are, in my opinion, the ones who put in that extra effort.

Home will never revert to the same quaint experience it was three years ago, when there were few games, few commodities, few people and a more or less homogenized experience. But I strongly doubt Home will ever turn into a full subscription service, or that Sony would be stupid enough to force users to spend money in order to enjoy the basic social aspects of Home that have remained essentially unchanged (or improved upon, such as group voice chat) since the beginning. It’s logical for us to expect various moneymaking ventures in Home, and prudent of us to try to help guide such things for better satisfaction.

Will this negatively impact the sense of escapism from aspects of the real world we find distasteful? That’s a question each person has to answer for himself. It might ultimately drive you out of Home. Or it might be far, far less intrusive than you think.

I’m really tempted to start a new article series under the theme of, “Here’s What Home Should Be” — and try to solicit Home’s most vocal detractors to put together their vision of what Home should be instead, with supporting arguments of how it could monetize and be feasible. I doubt many would have the patience to write such a thing — and some of them probably don’t have the business acumen to put it together to begin with — but it could be a remarkably insightful series that would really benefit the Home community in the long run.

We’re at a point where the community is willing to accept a VIP space, and even a portal to it from the core spaces, but not the segmentation of the core spaces themselves.

Ultimately, that’s the best direction for Home, because it gives new users a chance to look around and get their feet wet before someone starts tapping them on the shoulder and asking for money. If the first impression is one of a divided community where money buys access, that will alienate a portion of the userbase, a move that Home can ill afford at this point in its development.

There was a rather interesting thread on the EU forums commenting on this topic as well. Nearly every respondent was opposed to the idea of roping off part of a core space. Worth a read if you can access it.

Sodium was discussed at length. It’s not a core space. No one is suggesting that there should be no VIP areas in Home, only that they should not be in the core spaces that Sony has defined. No portion of the previous Home core was off-limits to anyone (Central Plaza, The Mall, Gamer’s Lounge, Movie Theater), so why should some part of the new core be roped off?

It’s not my place to comment on how others choose to argue. Throughout that debate, I did my level best to remain civil to everyone and to try and defuse arguments with reason. I also kept that thread going when people attempted to tell those against the rope to shut up and move on.

Here’s a bit of reality: It is a big deal, not for what it is, but for the precedent it sets. You validate that point in your own posts by bringing up the Sodium VIP area. If some members of the community hadn’t taken a stand against this, there is no doubt in my mind that many more roped-off areas would have followed in other parts of the core.

I had to plow through more than 400 posts in that thread until I found viable suggestions on how to implement a rewards program in Home. All those personal attacks! I know HearItWow objected to Norse describing it as ‘bitter, angry, ugliness’ and pointed out why they were so upset -- but this time I agree with Norse: it is ugly when people use personal attacks to try to make a point.

But I sincerely hope that you (and the other reasonable voices in the Forum) will not give up and move on. Let’s continue to do what was discussed in staff meeting: ‘take the high road, don’t stoop to that level, offer constructive criticism, look for solutions’. If others choose to attack, just ignore it and keep going.

No one asked Home users if they wanted a Home segregated by game genres. No one asked Home users if they wanted a theater segregated by a velvet rope according to Mansion ownership. The amount of double-talk from the HCMs (and yes, I realize they’re just messengers) on this issue was unbelievable. And although I haven’t commented publicly on this before, I fail to understand why there would be a need to develop a theater “sans a rope” when in fact the original theater design is “sans a rope” as can be seen by merely visiting the Euro or Asian Homes.

As I’ve already observed on the forums, when you deliberately set out to create artificial class divides in Home, when you deliberately try to stir the ugly emotions of arrogance and superiority and jealousy and resentment just to push product, you lose all moral credibility to complain about a worsened forum environment. It’s not as if you weren’t warned. I and a few others have been complaining about the jeeps, the helicopters and the velvet ropes for precisely this reason, because we know it creates a coarsened social environment in Home, and the coarsened forum environment is just yet another consequence as well.

Yesterday marked the four year anniversary of a loved one’s death, reminding me of the reason why I first became active in Home to begin with. As HIW commented, many of us turn to Home to escape the nonsense of the everyday world, and so, when I go into Home and I find that nonsense (in the form of red carpets and velvet ropes) there too, it turns Home from an escape into a twisted reflection of the real world, thereby nullifying my reason for being in, and using Home at all.

I would like Home to be available as an escape for anyone, without having to make any purchases to justify one’s presence there. The original vision of Home included the use of Home for social communication for all gamers, and that vision is being obscured by this new “Sonyland.” It shouldn’t be that difficult to devise means of distinguishing between those who choose to use Home as a free service, versus those who choose to use Home for trolling and harassment. But is Sony making any efforts along these lines?

I would also like to point out that this serves Sony’s interests too, because people are not going to bother to explore Home in the first place, especially those who are new to virtual worlds, if every activity in Home carries a price tag. This is why I commented during the recent VIP space debates that there needs to remain a compelling experience for all Home users. People may “need” to take an economy flight to get from NY to LA, but no one “needs” to use Home. Sony has to give them a reason. Saying that Home has been free for three (or however many) years now, and that things need to change, is wishful thinking completely divorced from reality. Societal attitudes regarding virtual worlds and their uses (or non-use) aren’t going to be changed in just three years of Open Beta. Nor are they going to be changed in just three more years of “Sonyland.” As I’ve pointed out before, we are dealing with generational changes here. Just witness the adoption of computer technology over the past few decades.

These past few days, I’ve been thinking back about all the HSM articles I’ve written, and many of the forum discussions I’ve had, and it’s become crystal-clear that there’s a handful of voices who have been consistently trying to oppose anything I’ve had to say about the NA Home and its future development. Not that I’m the only one of course. HearItWow has also made some wonderful critiques about the direction of the NA Home, and so has Joanna Dark. And in my opinion, the Home community would be better served, if the decision makers over the NA Home spent less time trying to impose their view of things on this new service, and spent more time listening to those of us who have been trying to inform that there are other approaches which might be usefully followed.

And just to be clear, this also is not a formal response. The above are just a few thoughts upon which I’ve been dwelling these past few days.

The feeling that I keep getting is that Sony had a really good idea pitched to them, and then completely messed up the implementation. There’s a sociological ripple effect when something new is introduced to Home, and perhaps they’re just now starting to take this into account when they make business decisions.

The fallacy in the thinking that I’m seeing is that they treated the Mansion experiments (the rope, the jeep, the chopper, etc.) like how a game developer would treat downloadable content packs, and completely overlooked the much more complicated permutations that go with administrating a virtual society.

Hopefully, the insights from all of this recent activity will produce a superb rewards program. I’m enthusiastic for what they might come up with.

I would suggest that those alleging “bitter, angry ugliness” take a step back and ask themselves what it was that was being fought for: A section of Home that is open and available to all, freely, in keeping with the tradition that Home has established.

Such a debate is likely to arouse passions on both sides, but at the core of it lies a simple question: Do we want a Home that excludes or a Home that includes? As a percentage of the userbase chooses to be in Home to escape the nonsense that permeates the everyday world, I believe that inclusion is the better path to success.

How many official forum bytes have been occupied with complaints of harassment and trolling, all sharing the same, single underlying message: This shouldn’t be happening -here-. Throwing an arbitrary divide into the community, in the form of a velvet rope, only exacerbates that frustration.

There is no harm in a loyalty program, but as you pointed out, Norse, it should be based on merits other than the purchase of a particular personal space. It should also be reserved for those who have earned it, not flaunted in a common area beyond the basic need of explaining its existence.

I truly fear that someone’s trial balloon has been popped, and that certain forces are railing against those who held the pins.

This doesn’t mean that everything the developers do is perfect. Far from it. But one of the things I believe in is that before you try to change someone’s mind, try to see things from their perspective first. Speaking as someone who’s worked in resort development for a long time, I can tell you point-blank that what I’m always looking for is constructive criticism. Compliments are wonderful, sure, but I’m constantly on the lookout for how I can improve.

The problem is that “You suck and this is stoopid what were you thinking” feedback doesn’t give me anything to go on. And the same holds true for Sony. I know it might feel good to dogpile on “the Man” — I’ve seen users doing that on the forum to, in essence, earn some sort of street cred — but it doesn’t accomplish anything. Oh, sure, it might bring a rope down, but it doesn’t give any insight as to what to do next.

I take a fair amount of heat for writing stuff which is viewed as egregiously pro-Sony (which is somewhat amusing, considering how much criticism I’ve directed towards them over the last year), but the reality is that we should *all* be rooting for Sony to succeed — because the only way they’re going to do that is to compel enough people to spend money on quality products and services. The best thing that we can do, as Home citizens, is to help guide the economic engine and business strategy of Home, because ultimately it is we who benefit from this.

I hope to never again see the bitter, angry ugliness that developed during the rope debate on the Sony forum. The conduct from some of the people involved really surprised me. There’s nothing wrong with disagreement and discussion — hell, HSM is Home’s version of Firing Line, after all — but we must strive to remember that famous line from Lost Horizon: “Be *kind* to one another.”

It worries me that there’s a growing “us versus them” sentiment on the Sony forum from disenfranchised users who somehow feel that Home has let them down. It’s Sony’s responsibility to actively (and continuously) solicit feedback in order to keep these people engaged — GlassWalls’ recent inquiry was a perfect example of this — but it’s also the responsibility of the community to build itself and also take an active role in helping to shape the future of Home.

If HSM can have some small part in this process, then we have done our jobs.

Both of our calculations point to a fairly small active userbase in Home, and only a fraction of that which spends money with any regularity. This, I believe, is why Home is making a concerted effort to broaden its active user base with high-cost ventures such as the Hub (that are completely free to enjoy), and at the same time exploring premium pricing strategies. After three years of open beta, they’ve built up a core of repeat spenders, so now it’s a matter of trying to increase the revenue per available user.

Introducing a loyalty program makes a lot of sense to me. It does create something of a class structure in Home, and the mistake Sony has made so far is that they didn’t set it properly to begin with (limiting it to the Mansion wasn’t the best idea). It should ideally be something that anyone can buy into, with clearly defined and lucrative services/products available to those who join.